Although Alex Haley popularized the term “Roots” and the searching for one’s origins, he didn’t invent the desire of many people to seek out and ascertain their ancestors. Members of patriotic societies who are descended from soldiers of the American Revolution and the colonial period have been pursuing the same treasure hunt for generations.
Since the publication of Charles Darwin’s ORIGIN OF SPECIES 118 years ago, a cult of people has been searching for their ancestors among monkeys and apes. Their most recent boost came from TIME Magazine, which published a cover story that purports to show pictures of the alleged missing link.
The trouble with these people is that they are not content with claiming their own roots, they want to force everyone else to believe that monkeys and apes are their ancestors, too.
These people have discovered that the way to get a nation to accept a new concept is to teach it affirmatively in the schools, while at the same time censoring out all alternative points of view. Most schools and colleges now quite generally teach the evolution of man from apes as though it were a scientifically proven fact, while forbidding children to consider the alternative theory “that man was directly created by God.
Actually there is more scientific evidence to Support the Bible than evolution. Witness the discovery of Noah’s Ark on Mount Ararat in Turkey, the corroborative evidence from other cultures that there was indeed a Great Flood, and the bewildering multiplicity of languages which resulted from the attempt to build the useless Tower of Babel.
It takes an act of faith to believe the hypothesis that man is descended from apes. It requires acceptance of a tissue of speculation, imagination, and contradictions. Just looking at the picture of the ugly monster on the cover of TIME would encourage identification with the more compatible and beautiful explanation of life that creation inspires.
The kernel of the evidence that TIME presents is this: “Anthropologists now believe that man’s family tree goes back to a primate called Dryopithecus, a true ape that appeared some 20 million years ago. … One branch evolved into the ancestors of today’s great apes — the gorillas, chimpanzees and orangutans, which are man’s closest living cousins. Another produced a creature called Gigantopithecus, a huge ground ape that roamed the valleys of Asia for a few million years before it became extinct. A third branch gave rise to Ramapithecus, which most anthropologists believe was a distant ancestor of man.”
It is difficult to see how anyone could derive psychological satisfaction, anthropological identity, spiritual uplift, or scientific evidence from the TIME statement that apes “are man’s closest living cousins.”
When our schools teach evolution only, this is perceived by many young people as a development that happened without a life-giving Creator. When our schools explain the origin of life in terms of evolution only, they are really teaching the religion of humanism which denies the God of Judeo-Christian civilization.
Perhaps modern anthropology and archeology will someday discover the key to where man came from. Meanwhile, instead of requiring the teaching of the evolution theory only, would it not be fairer to permit the teaching of the Biblical history of creation as well as the theory of origin by evolution?
